speed of applications

[chris at tkgh.org]

** Long message warning **

I am involved in installing old PCs in schools in Africa, and would very 
much like to use Linux. What seems to me to be the greatest 
impediment is the speed of the applications.

The only package I have seen which seems to me to compare 
reasonably with MS Office is OpenOffice. I have tried abiword and 
gnumerics but preferred OpenOffice, although I cannot remember in 
detail why. Perhaps I should check them out again.

Anyway, comparing speeds. Running "winword file.doc" on a P75 with 
64MB of RAM, running NT 4.0, takes 14 seconds from hitting enter to 
fully loaded. Running "swriter file.sxw" on a P100 with 64MB of RAM 
takes 20 seconds till the OpenOffice logo appears and a further 100 
seconds until it is ready to use. The Windows version of OpenOffice 
takes a similar time, so I don't think that my Linux configuration is to 
blame.

Another comparison. Loading XWinPro, a commercial X-server takes 
10 seconds. Loading XFree with Cygwin takes 80 seconds. These are 
like-for-like comparisons and suggest that for at least some unix 
developers, speed is not an issue.

A lot of attention here seems to be being paid to producing an easy-to-
use installer, but from my perspective this is barely an issue, although 
the size of the installation is. It doesn't particularly matter if I have to 
spend two weeks setting up a system as long as I can then reproduce it 
quickly, but if I were to install OpenOffice on a 66MHz 486 then they 
would feel that they were being fobbed off with an inferior product 
before they looked at it, just because of the time it takes to load.

The only way I could consider using OpenOffice as it stands is on a 
high spec. server with the old PCs just being used as X terminals.

I realise that RULE is not responsible for penOffice, but I feel there is 
not enough emphasis on applications. My "clients" don't care how easy 
it is to install the operating system, because I do it for them. What they 
want is a word processor and spreadsheet that will stand comparison 
with Word and Excel.

Regards,
Chris.